Acquisition

After adding native support for animated GIFs earlier this week, Twitter is focusing on live videos by acquiring SnappyTV, a service that allows content creators to edit and share live videos from TV broadcasts quickly.

Apple has reportedly snatched up Spotsetter, an app and service that provided personalized recommendations for places to go. Spotsetter was co-founded in 2012 by Stephen Tse and Johnny Lee. Apple apparently has no plans for the app and service itself, but instead wanted to acquire the technology at Spotsetter and the two co-founders.

Twitter is reportedly looking to acquire SoundCloud in what could be its biggest acquisition to date. According to Re/code, which cites sources familiar with the matter, SoundCloud's 250 million consumer base is a major motivator behind the deal.

Burstly, the company behind popular mobile app testing platform TestFlight and in-app ad manager SkyRocket, has been acquired by Apple. According to TechCrunch (and noticed by our comrades over at Android Central), some odd behavior has come out of Burstly over the past few days.

Apple has acquired AlgoTrim, a developer of data compression technology based in Malmö, Sweden, according to a new report by Swedish industry news service Rapidus. The report says that AlogTrim's CEO and head of development Anders Holtsberg has moved to Silicon Valley and is now available through Apple's switchboard, according to TechCrunch.

Apple has been no stranger to acquiring smaller companies with desirable technologies, and the latest reports suggest Cupertino has now snapped up Matcha.tv. Once an iOS and web app, Matcha.tv offered its users a search and recommendation service for video that covered multiple providers including iTunes, Amazon Prime and Hulu, but mysteriously shut up shop back in May. Now, according to VentureBeat, we know why:

Apple is reportedly in talks to acquire Primesense, an Israeli company perhaps best known for their work on the original Xbox Kinect sensor alongside Microsoft. The tabled figure from Cupertino is a cool $280 million, and follows the visit of Apple representatives interested in using the company's technology.

Acquisitions are part and parcel of the modern life of app development. For differing reasons, large companies have a habit of buying up smaller app developers. Sometimes -- take Instagram as an example -- the app in question lives on as its own separate entity. Others, like Snapseed, lose their apps on some platforms, but remain on others. And then, there's those that get killed altogether. So, lets take a look together at some of those apps which have gone the way of the Dinosaurs.

Having been much rumored in recent days, today came the official announcement that Yahoo! had in fact closed a deal to acquire Tumblr. The deal is reported to be worth a cool $1.1 billion in cash, and CEO Marissa Meyer said her piece:

New email app Mailbox, which was launched by Orchestra last month, has been acquired by Dropbox. In a post on the company’s blog, the Mailbox team said that this acquisition was about accelerating growth for Mailbox.